


light in dismal corridors

by depthsofgreen



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Arkham Asylum, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-15
Updated: 2017-03-15
Packaged: 2018-10-05 11:47:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10306682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/depthsofgreen/pseuds/depthsofgreen
Summary: Ed, Oswald, and Arkham in triptych form. Three scenes: the first Ed visiting Oswald when he's locked up in season two, the second Oswald visiting Ed when he's locked up between seasons two and three, and the third taking place post-3x14, when Oswald's revenge has trapped Ed back into those black-and-white Arkham stripes again.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Nygmobblepot Week 2017](https://nygmobblepotweek.tumblr.com/), Day Three: Arkham.

I.

Ed is speaking, Oswald is vaguely aware. He sees his lips moving, and can hear the syllabic contours of a sentence muted beneath the sing-silence in his head.

His lips keep moving, and Oswald stares, and stares, still uncomprehending, until it all gets to be too much and his focus shifts, up to the rounded window letting yellow sunbeams in. It’s strange, the light, like a memory he’s experiencing in real life. He drinks it up, this dancing yellow, this remembrance of a world outside the grimy walls of Arkham, mind blank yet whirring, frenetic somehow -

There’s warmth on his hand, suddenly. It’s soft, with some pressure. _Ed’s touching me_ , Oswald thinks, and he looks back at him, realizing he must have uttered that aloud because Ed is eyeing him strangely, head cocked and glasses tilted.

“Mr. Penguin?”

And _that_ Oswald understands. His name, or one of them. The one that means something, holds power.

Oswald shakes his head, coming to, thoughts cohering through the swirl of clotted color in his head: his name is Oswald Cobblepot, aka The Penguin. He’s in Arkham Asylum for the murder of Theo Galavan. The man before him, Edward Nygma - a friend. Hugo Strange, somewhere in this building, rose glasses flashing menacingly - an enemy. The reason Oswald is losing...something. His memories, his sanity, himself.

Everything hits him at once like a wall of sound. He feels near tears, but holds them back.

“Mr. Penguin,” Ed repeats, lower this time, and Oswald’s vision unblurs, again, the features of Ed’s face sharpening in his sight.

Ed looks gentle. Concerned, even. Nothing like how Jim had looked. _Jim_ , who Oswald was undergoing all of this for. Jim, who didn’t care that he was being tortured even despite that. Jim, who he’d considered a friend, before all this.

A throb of pain in his chest crystallizes into anger. Everything sharpens further.

“I’m sorry, Ed,” Oswald speaks, voice rough but mostly steady, “Can you repeat what you were saying? I missed it.”

“It wasn’t important,” Ed says with a wave of his hand. “Are you okay? Have you been - drugged? Or - “

“I’m fine,” Oswald says, a little too quickly.

There’s no use in getting Ed involved, he knows. It’ll only raise questions about their friendship, potentially implicate Ed in this mess, and get him thrown in here, too. Tempting though the thought of having Ed with him is, he can’t bring himself to let it happen (Strange’s lenses flash pink in his mind, and Oswald wonders, with a shudder, if this is genuine care for a friend or simply Strange’s conditioning beginning to take effect).

“Are you quite sure?” Ed asks, the lines of his mouth skeptical.

“Yes,” Oswald insists. “Please, repeat what you were saying earlier when I...zoned out.”

“I was only saying how - _odd_ it feels to be in here. I had endless nightmares about this place as a kid. You know the old, silly folklore: the raving ghost of Amadeus Arkham, secret passages, bleeding doors…”

Oswald shivers. Ed notices, frowning at himself.

“All that to say,” Ed continues, “When they reopened it last year, the nightmares came back. Being here, now, it’s...both less and more than I imagined.”

Oswald opens his mouth, wanting desperately to tell him he doesn’t know the half of what these walls and hallways hide. He stops himself, watching as Ed looks around him, conspiratorially, to where the guards are not listening.

Ed leans in.

“It’s absurd, but: I’m halfway afraid they’re not going to let me out of here,” Ed confesses, cheeks paling.

And _that_ , Oswald knows, is why he can say nothing of his predicament, much as he wants to. Ed wouldn’t survive this place.

“They’ll let you out,” Oswald assures him, or tries to, given the strain in his voice and the heaviness in his eyes. “I thank you for the visit, friend. I appreciate it, I really do. But you should go now, and please...don’t come back. I’m fine.”

“Mr. Penguin, it’s no trouble - “

“You’ve just said that it is. It’s okay. You’ve done enough. Far more than anyone else.”

He sees Jim’s face, again, then: pink lenses flashing. Oswald shakes them away, throat tight.

Ed squeezes his hand, and it’s only then that Oswald realizes he’s still holding it. Oswald manages a smile, genuinely grateful for the touch. He’ll hold the memory of it tight the next time a guard slams him into a wall, or an inmate into a table, or Ms. Peabody onto that chair -

Ed is clearly gearing up to speak again, reading something on Oswald’s face, when the guards stalk over, each taking one of Oswald’s arms roughly in hand, fingers bruising, lifting him out of his chair and away from Ed’s cling with far more force than necessary.

“Alright, Cobblepot,” comes a gruff voice to his side. “Visits over. Professor Strange would like to see you now.”

Panic grips Oswald like a full-body fist. For Ed’s sake, he tries not to let it show.

As the guards push him toward the door, leg dragging behind him, Oswald turns his head back to Ed, still sitting with wide eyes and mouth stricken. _Don’t come back for me_ , Oswald mouths to him.

Ed never does.

II.

Oswald learns Ed has been sent to Arkham too long after the fact, distracted as he’s been by the traumatic remnants of his own stay there, that treacherous (now-dead) step-family, and then, miraculously, impossibly, Fish Mooney, risen from the dead, one eye fearsomely aglow.

There isn’t much he can actually remember about his time at Arkham. Merely fragments, here and there: Strange’s glasses, Ms. Peabody’s purple lipstick, Jim’s indifferent face...and Ed, eyes and touch tender, sitting willingly in the building that had so haunted him as a kid (and hadn’t it haunted all of them, really, the _strange_ ones, the ones who saw themselves reflected in the mythic narratives of the ‘mad’ inmates it’d consumed?).

It’s some comfort to know that, at least, Strange is no longer running the place, the building’s machines and monsters sealed back into its walls. Even still, he finds himself worrying, over Ed, thrown in there quite alone, and by Jim Gordon - traitorous, uncaring Jim - no less.

He resolves to visit him, to offer some scrap of comfort the way Ed’s touch had done for him. He channels his nervousness (unsure Ed even wants to see him) into acquiring gifts, some small, others luxurious, all reminding him of Ed in some way: a green cashmere sweater here, a little gilded trinket to fiddle with there.

When he finally works up the nerve to visit, to pass through those iron gates that he still felt in some strange way were around him always, he’s overwhelmed, by the tactile feel and smell of the asylum beneath his feet, the lost-then-vivid memories throbbing in its air. Overwhelmed, too, by something light in his stomach, like prismatic butterflies, because here he is, about to see Ed, who had lain lilies at his mother’s grave and visited him at great personal cost and who Oswald has missed so, so much.

When he’s seated in front of him (the guards don’t dare touch him now, power his again), Oswald is struck by how _good_ Ed looks, hair loosely curled at his forehead, those awful black and white stripes somehow tapered flatteringly to his long, slight frame.

“I’m so happy to see you, Ed, and looking so well at that,” Oswald breaks the opening silence to say.

“Mr. Penguin - “

“You can call me - “

“Why are you here?”

“I wanted to see you,” Oswald says, maybe a little pathetically, but it’s the simple truth. “I’ve been - preoccupied, and didn’t even hear you’d been locked up until a couple of weeks ago.”

Ed stares, suspicion heavy in the hang of his shoulders and his unblinking eyes.

“Did you receive the gifts I sent?” Oswald asks, self-consciousness deflating him somewhat.

“I did. Thank you. It was...very thoughtful of you.”

Oswald smiles at that, perking up.

“I overcame my Arkham conditioning,” Oswald announces, proudly. “If that’s why you seem - less than thrilled to see me.”

“I am thrilled to see you, believe me,” Ed says quickly, smile tight. “I’m just...surprised you want to see me, is all. After…”

Ed trails off, looking down, and Oswald recognizes his off-kilter posturing now for what it is: guilt. Guilt for turning Oswald away when he’d been let out of this very place, perhaps even guilt for never returning to see him even though Oswald had requested it.

Ridiculous, of course. That was nothing, after what Jim had done, Strange had done, Fish had done (and oh, how the list went on and on).

“Please,” Oswald says. “It is forgotten.”

Ed nods at that, looking unsure but grateful. Oswald catches himself wanting to touch his hand, as Ed had touched his at this very table when the roles were switched, but Ed’s are out of sight, sitting in his lap.

“How are you?” Oswald asks, now that the air between them has cleared, if only temporarily. “Better now with Strange gone, I bet.”

“Oddly enough, no,” Ed frowns, and Oswald notices, for the first time, the darkened shadows under his eyes. “When Strange was here, things were...objectively more horrifying. No ghosts or bleeding doors, maybe, but something very like the Arkham of my boyhood nightmares nonetheless.”

Oswald nods, sympathetically. He knows that hellscape-Arkham well.

“But now...it’s just so _boring_. Nothing for my mind to latch onto, so it’s attacking itself.”

Ed sighs, then, hands rising to cover his face (and, _god_ , Oswald wants to touch them, still).

“I’m sorry,” Ed bemoans, self-deprecating. “I realize it’s grotesque for me to be bewailing _boredom_ after what _you_ went through here.”

“Not at all,” Oswald says, comfortingly, watching Ed’s hands fall back into his lap with a twinge of disappointment. “That makes perfect sense to me.”

Oswald remembers sitting for days in his father’s mansion, unmoving, nothing to fixate on but the taste of wine and the rotting smell of his stepmother’s corpse thickening the air. It had been, in its own aimless, hollow way, nearly as painful as the torture.

“Yes,” Ed smiles, then, showing bright teeth for the first time since Oswald sat down. “Of course it makes sense to you.”

They sit there, smiling, a little sadly but mutually comforted by the _connection_ of that quiet melancholy.

The moment is interrupted by the gravelly voice of one of the guards occupying the room: “Mr. Cobblepot, I’m afraid this one’s gotta go off to group.”

Oswald turns to look at the brute, angered but nodding nonetheless.

“Fine,” Oswald spits, turning back to Ed. “I’ll be back.”

“Mr. Penguin,” Ed protests, “You really don’t have to - I know this must be traumatic for you - “

“I’ll be back,” Oswald repeats, firmly, picking up his cane and twirling it happily in his hand.

Ed’s smile returns, eyes glittering. The shadows fall away.

As Oswald exits the building, then those horrid gates, he’s shocked to realize just how eager he is to get back inside, hoping idly he’ll get the chance to grab Ed’s hand next time.

III.

After Ed had put a bullet in him and left him to drown, everyone in Gotham City expected Oswald to kill him immediately upon return.

Oswald had thought about it, of course. Fantasized about it, even: stabbing him, leaving him to bleed out, death as slow as Oswald’s would have been had Ed succeeded. Ed would cry, and beg for mercy, as Oswald had, would voice his deep regrets and admit Oswald had been right on that dock - they did need each other, he saw that now. Ed would look at him, fear and love and desperation etched into every curve of his face, and Oswald would stab him anyway. He’d stab him, and leave him to die without so much as a syllable of comfort breathed in his direction. Not even the ghost of a tender touch. Ed would die crushed beneath the weight of how _unloved_ he was, how utterly _alone_.

He would die, in other words, as Oswald had (because Oswald can only ever think back on that day as a death, his rise from ice-cold seawaters like the ascent of a zombie from a dirt grave).

So when they’d all urged him to _kill the fucker_ , there was a moment where Oswald really thought that he just fucking might.

Oswald can’t say for sure what stopped him. Maybe the fact that death would be easy. That he knows, better than anyone, that it’s _life_ , life that persists when all the light goes out of it, that hurts beyond measure. Maybe it was something deep inside of him, on the other hand, something raw and untouched by the bitter reach of sorrow that couldn’t bear the thought of Ed dying, even after everything.

Or maybe it had been as simple as a memory: Ed, years ago now, sitting furtively across a table from a dazed Oswald in black and white stripes, confessing childhood terrors centered on Arkham folklore, ghosts and bleeding doors. And then, more recently, Ed, in the stripes himself, confessing that the folklore was a mercy next to Arkham’s reality, tedious and dull and _quiet_ despite the constant maddened screams.

Regardless of the _why_ , this is how all their warfare and bloodshed ended up: Edward Nygma, back in scratchy Arkham stripes, locked indefinitely within the walls of that haunted house of his boyhood nightmares.

It had been easy, really. Ed is brilliant, utterly so, _frighteningly_ so, but he _knows_ it, and his need to ensure that _others_ know it too is a weakness running far deeper than the capacity for love he’d once identified as his biggest risk for downfall. He leaves _clues_ behind, for god’s sake, like he’s eager to get caught, eager to reveal himself. Eager to be feared.

In one fell swoop (let it be known: Oswald is brilliant, too), Oswald had granted Ed his greatest wish and fear all at once. Seen he was. Caught, certainly. Not feared anymore, no. The fear was _his_ to bear now. Back to Arkham he went, legendary but locked away with only himself to talk to. And what a torment _that_ would be.

Oswald walks into the visiting room, sits down, and then there’s Ed, moving toward him, black-and-white garment hanging loosely over his gaunt frame, and it’s all so _familiar_ , for a moment, like Oswald is standing here just as he had a year or so ago, butterflies in his stomach and an eagerness to please lighting his eyes.

It isn’t butterflies he feels now, though. It’s a twist in his belly he can register only as nausea. Here Ed is, looking, truth be told, quite terrible, and he’s been locked in here for months now but somehow Oswald still feels cold terror at the sight of him, remembering his dead eyes and listless execution ( _I loved her, Oswald, and you killed her_ ), and it’s like his hands are bound before him, helpless, all over again.

Oswald swallows as Ed takes a seat in front of him, blinking back the wetness in his eyes. Ed will never see him cry again, and certainly not now.

“Oswald,” Ed says, an embittered greeting. “I confess I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to come here. I was expecting you to jump at the opportunity to gloat ages ago.”

Oswald is silent for a moment, struck all over again by that voice. It’s been so long since he heard it in person, and he can’t tell if Ed’s manner of speaking has altered after months of imprisonment or if Oswald’s memory of it is merely distorted through filters of pain and cracked love.

“I had no desire to gloat,” Oswald finally speaks. “We both know this isn’t exactly my ideal vision of us.”

“I suppose I could thank you for not killing me,” Ed says, drumming his fingers against the tabletop, “Only some mornings I wake up and catch myself wishing you had.”

“Yes, well,” Oswald smiles, mocking. Angry. “Consider it payback for accidentally leaving me alive. You’re hardly the only one who regrets their own survival sometimes.”

Ed looks down at that, shoulders slanting downwards. He still feels guilt, then. Good.

“So why are you here after all this time if not to gloat?” Ed asks, eyes on Oswald again.

The curiosity brightens his face just a shade. That raw part inside Oswald that hasn’t yet adjusted to the grim reality of what Ed did to him feels something like relief at the sight of that.

“I come with a question,” Oswald says.

“Well, those _are_ my specialty.”

“I made the acquaintance of one Mr. Valeska a few days ago. You know him - funny guy. A little hard to look at, but just a _barrel_ of laughs.”

Ed’s face pales.

“He had a lot of whacky things to say, but the one I found most amusing _by far_ concerned his Arkham escape. His most recent one, I mean.”

Oswald watches Ed carefully. Ed says nothing.

“See,” Oswald continues. “He claims _you_ got him out of here. That you’ve cracked the security code, so to speak.”

“Does that surprise you?” Ed asks.

“That you cracked it? Not in the slightest.”

“But something about Mr. Valeska’s story did surprise you, or you wouldn’t be here, promising me a question.”

“Well,” Oswald says, “He’s been out for two weeks now. Two weeks of freedom, while you, the man with wits enough to make it happen, remain here.”

“So you’re wondering why I haven’t escaped myself, since I have clear means to.”

“Yes.”

“What’s more, you’re wondering if there’s some kind of devious plot afoot that would render my being here advantageous to me in some way.”

“Yes.”

“And, most significantly of all, you’re wondering if said devious plot involves or targets you in some way.”

“Obviously.”

Ed laughs, softly. Oswald does not, but he understands the impulse.

 _You’ve missed him_ , he thinks. _You can admit that to yourself, here with him before you._

“Well,” Ed says, laughter ceasing but still with a hint of a smile on his lips, “I assure you, Oswald, with utmost sincerity, that you have nothing to worry about. You were owed punishment. I’ve accepted that. So here I stay.”

“So you are essentially rotting in here, of your own free will, because I - a man you, let’s not forget, _killed_ \- am owed _punishment_?”

Skepticism isn’t a strong enough word to capture what Oswald is feeling right now.

“Yes,” Ed agrees. “But it’s about me, too. It’s no secret to you that I...struggled after what I did to you on the dock. Struggled, too, with everything that came after. It’s not just that you’re owed punishment. I owe myself penance.”

Oswald stares at that. Ed seems sincere enough. It’s difficult to trust that, after everything, but somehow Oswald does. He can feel his defenses lowering of their own accord.

Oswald, considering his response, lets his eyes fall to the table. Ed’s hands are lying flat atop it. Oswald allows himself to be distracted by them, those long graceful fingers, the bumps of knuckle bone, the green veins visible through paled skin.

He remembers, all that time ago, sitting here, in this room, in Ed’s seat, incoherent from Strange’s abuse, snapped back into some semblance of reality by Ed, his voice and the touch of his hand. He remembers, too, wanting to repay that favor, back when Ed was in Arkham the first time and there was still nothing but burgeoning love between them. Arkham, so full of bruising grips and violence at every turn...Oswald had _so_ longed to give Ed something gentle to cling to.

He’d never gotten the chance, shyness or lack of opportunity getting the better of him at every visit.

Oswald’s hand is reaching across the table and lying palm-flat over Ed’s before he has time to doubt the decision, a sea-swell of sense memory overcoming the warning signs blaring behind his eyes.

Oswald feels Ed’s hand tense beneath his, for just a flicker of a moment, before it melts back into the table. His skin is soft and the contact warm, the glow of it fluorescing up Oswald’s arm. He strokes, just slightly, then brings the tip of his thumb beneath Ed’s wrist, feeling the thump-thump-thump of his pulse.

His eyes flick up to Ed’s face. Ed’s eyes are closed, his lips slack: the perfect portrait of a man savoring something he’s been starved for.

Oswald feels a blaze of fondness, intense, _blinding_. Panicked, he snaps his hand away as if he’d pressed it against an open flame and only just realized it.

Ed’s eyes flutter open, wet with gratitude despite the abrupt pull-back.

Oswald opens his mouth, and realizes he isn’t sure what he wants to say. He wants to explain himself, spit something cruel and dismissive, and confess how much he misses him all at once. The three sentiments, atop each other like a palimpsest, get stuck in his throat.

He can only sigh instead, the ragged sharpness of it more revealing than he wants it to be. His body betraying him once more.

“I should...I should go,” Oswald says, when the silence and the trembling tenderness it contains becomes too much to bear.

“Okay,” Ed says, voice low. “Thank you - for coming.”

Oswald nods at that, a touch flustered, and stands, leaning on his cane.

He’s taken a few limping steps toward the door when he turns to where Ed is sitting still.

“When do you think your... _penance_ will be done?” Oswald asks.

 _Let it be soon_ hangs unspoken in the air, but he can tell by the sudden twinkle in Ed’s eye that he somehow hears it anyway.

“I think that might ultimately be for you to decide,” Ed answers, sounding pleased and solemn all at once. “You know where I’ll be in the meantime.”

Oswald gapes, cheeks warming.

He turns back toward the door with a quick nod, heartbeat humming in his ears.

 _Soon_ , Oswald thinks, _I’ll let you let yourself out soon_.

As the door closes behind him, Oswald laughs, the joyous sound of it reverberating down the green and dimly-lit corridor before him.

He wonders if it might not be the first genuinely happy sound these walls have ever had the chance to echo back.

**Author's Note:**

> Title lifted and adapted from Grant Morrison's _Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth_. The Arkham folklore that Ed references is pulled from here as well.


End file.
